GREENBEAN.COM
PRIVACY POLICY
Last Modified: May 2008
Greenbean.com is owned and operated by Congruent Media LLC, a company duly
organized in Maryland, USA. Congruent
Media LLC is committed to your privacy. We take our ethical responsibilities
and your privacy seriously. We have a strong commitment to providing excellent
service to all our customers and visitors of this Website, including respecting
your concerns about privacy. This Privacy Policy discloses how we collect, protect,
use and share information gathered about you on our website. We hope that this
disclosure will help increase your confidence in our website and the service
Greenbean.com provides you. Therefore, in compliance with industry standards
and regulations enforced typically by the Federal and State Governments, we
abide the following privacy policy.
By using this Website you explicitly agree to the terms and conditions of
the Privacy Policy in effect at the time of your use. If you do not agree to
have your information used in any of the ways described in the Privacy Policy,
you must discontinue use of the Website and/or the Services.
Browsing
This website does not collect personally identifiable information from your
computer when you browse this website and request pages from our servers. This
means that, unless you voluntarily and knowingly provide us with personally
identifiable information, we will not know your name, your email address, or
any other personally identifiable information. We do track user traffic
patterns throughout all of our Internet published pages. However, this
information does not track or collect personally identifiable information about
our users, but instead provides overall usage statistics according to browser
types, MIME types and other general information contained in every user’s
browser. When you request a page from our website, our servers log the
information provided in the HTTP request header including the IP number, the
time of the request, the URL of your request, and other information that is
provided in the HTTP header. We collect the HTTP request header information in
order to make our website function correctly and provide you the functionality
that you see on this website. We also use this information to better understand
how visitors use our website and how we can better tune it, its contents and
functionality to meet your needs.
Detailed Explanation Regarding The Information We Collect Or Solicit From You
We collect your personal information via our sign up, registration and personal
profile forms for the purpose of having the necessary information in order to
provide our services to you which includes establishing your account in order
to allow our advertisers to send SMS based communications and emails.
We do not at the present time release your information to any third parties
except as might be needed to ensure the proper functionality of the tools and
services that we provide to you. However, we reserve the right to, sell, rent or
transfer your personal information to third parties for any purpose at our sole
discretion. We do not sell or transfer your personal information to
non-affiliated entities for their use without giving you the opportunity to
opt-out (See Opt-Out below). We may change or broaden the use of your personal
information at any time. Your personal information may be used to provide
promotional offers by means of email advertising, telephone marketing, direct
mail marketing, banner advertising, and other possible uses.
We ask you, via our user administration areas or during registration, to
provide both the minimum information necessary to establish an account with us,
which includes general membership accounts and advertiser accounts. Some
information that we request is optional and your voluntary submission of the
same furthers our ability to provide certain services, tools and functions to
you.
For example, there is a voluntary submission of information required to
customize the SMS messages issued by advertisers. If you would like to
participate in polls or surveys, you must supply the additional, optional
information required for such services and tools.
Should you decide to use our email to a friend (“Spill the Beans”) tool whereby
you elect to forward a link to a third party or entity then it is required that
you submit the receiving party’s email address and name. We collect this
information solely for the purpose of ensuring that the email is received and
also to maintain a record of who sent the email in case that information is
subpoenaed or otherwise requested from us subsequent to the sending of the
email by you.
Our system allows the sending of promotional advertisement material directly to
the cell phones of our subscribers via SMS messaging. Such promotional messages
will often consist of coupons, information regarding discount or “specials” and
other potential valuable information or content. In order for advertisers to be
able to send such coupons and discount information to the most appropriate
parties, we allow them to use our opt-in system to send you SMS messages. This
benefits both the advertisers and you, our consumer base. We do not share the
demographic information with any third party other than our advertisers who use
the information to better serve your needs.
We may from time to time conduct our own internal surveys. We engage in this
practice in order to improve the methods by which we serve our user base. We
may share, from time to time, aggregated demographic information contained in
or revealed by our surveys, with our partners, advertisers and sponsors but the
information that we share is not personally identifiable on an individual
basis.
Exceptions to our Privacy Policy
We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information, as
required, to comply with the law, applicable regulations, governmental and
quasi-governmental requests, judicial proceedings, court orders or subpoenas,
to enforce our Legal Notices or other agreements, relevant to a current or
pending legal matter in which you are a potential or actual party or otherwise
contributed in some way to the causation of the legal matter, or to protect our
rights, property or safety or the rights, property or safety of our users or
others (e.g., to a consumer reporting agency for fraud protection etc.).
Choice/Opt-out
We provide you the opportunity to ‘opt-out’ of having your personally
identifiable information used for certain purposes, when we ask for this
information. If you no longer wish to receive any enewsletters and promotional
communications, you may opt-out of receiving them by following the instructions
included in each newsletter or communication or by emailing or calling us per
the information contained on our contact page.
You may opt-out of having your personal information collected by a third party
that is not our agent/service provider, by providing instruction not to share
your information with such third parties. Such instruction must be done in
writing and sent to our customer service department at the following address:
Congruent Media LLC
Greenbean.com Customer Service
3600 O’Donnell Street, Suite 200
Baltimore, MD 21224
Minors
We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone
under the age of 13 years of age, a policy matching the requirements of the
Federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA). Any person
who provides their personal information through this Website represents that
they are 13 years of age or older.
Cookies
Please note that we employ the use of cookies. Currently we employ cookies when
visitors come to our website, and also when users create user accounts or login
to their existing accounts. We may further employ cookies to assist the
functionality of other tools, services and functions in the future.
A cookie is a small text file that is stored on a user’s computer for
record-keeping purposes. Cookies enhance your use of the Internet, in general,
and specifically we use cookies to enhance your usage of our application.
The information gathered is not shared with third parties other than described
herein. You may turn off your cookies by adjusting the appropriate setting on
your browser.
Please consult the HELP menu of your browser to learn how to turn off your cookies.
Cookies do not inherently reveal personal information and if you disable cookies
in your web browser, you may find your enjoyment of the Internet, and our site
in particular, to be reduced or impaired.
In order to seek out and repair functionality issues with our servers and
related programming, we may use your email and IP addresses for evaluation and
diagnostic purposes.
Cookies may provide Recording Session information, show us visitor preferences
regarding return visits to our website, help us to mange subscription or
private areas on our website, record user specific tracking or aggregate
tracking information of visitors and deliver user customized content based on
user specific information, such as browser type, screen type and resolution and
so forth. None of the information gathered is shared with third parties other
than described herein.
Other possible uses for the information that we collect include: internal
tracking, review, archiving, contacting purposes and providing custom content
for our user base.
General Information
It is our present policy not to send unsolicited emails or allow third parties
to contact you via the email address that you provide to us. We may, from time
to time, contact you to discuss issues relevant to your membership and,
naturally, we will contact you to respond to inquiries that you may send to us.
However, you can access our Website home page and browse our site without
disclosing your personal data. Member and advertiser registrations require the
disclosure of certain personal information, which we do not share except as
disclosed herein. Additionally, certain information will be requested of
members, affiliates and advertisers post registration so that we can better
serve their needs.
Service Providers
All our employees and data processors, who have access to, and are associated
with the processing of personal data, are obliged to respect the
confidentiality of our visitor’s and members’ personal data.
We may also use other third parties to provide certain clerical and information
processing and shipping services on our site. When you sign up for our
services, we will share only as much information as is necessary for the
provision of those services.
These third parties are prohibited from using your personally identifiable
information for any other purpose.
Further Data Collection
We may collect aggregate (general tracking) information about pages that users
visit on our site. Such aggregate statistical data may be shared with our
advertisers, affiliates, and business partners, or for public relations. We
also may collect user specific information about pages that users visit on our
site. Any information that you give us when you complete a contact form or
inquiry form, survey and so forth is collected by us.
Should you engage in any transaction with us, such as purchasing or using a
tool, product or service, we will collect the information necessary to complete
that transaction.
You may be required to complete online registration forms that provide us with
contact information (such as your name and street address), your email address,
and your phone numbers.
We may, from time to time, send you emails regarding our service so that we can
directly communicate with you regarding issues we determine to be relevant.
Securing the Transmission and Storage of Information
The security of your personal information is extremely important to us. We have
implemented a variety of physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to
protect the personal data that we have under our control. These policies, rules
and technical measures help to protect your data from unauthorized access,
improper use or disclosure, unauthorized modification, and unlawful destruction
or accidental loss.
We operate our data networks in a reasonably secure manner and our networks are
protected by commonly used and generally accepted industry standards to protect
the personal information submitted to us through the use of firewall,
encryption and password protection systems.
You can help to maintain the security of your online transactions by not
sharing your personal information or password with anyone. Remember, no method
of transmission over the Internet, method of electronic storage or firewall or
password protection system can be construed as being 100% secure under any and
all circumstances. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable
means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute
security. In addition, only authorized individuals have access to information
provided by our users.
Links to Other Sites
This Website may contain links to other sites such as third parties which are
not owned or controlled by us. Please be aware that this privacy policy only
addresses our company’s use and disclosure of your information collected on
this site.
While we try to link only to sites that share our standards and respect for
privacy, we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites.
We encourage you to be aware when you leave our site and to read the applicable
privacy policies and terms of conditions of each and every Website that collects
personally identifiable information.
This privacy statement applies only to information collected by this Website.
Supplementation / Enhancement of Information
We generally do not, however we reserve the right to, collect information about
our visitors to supplement or enhance the personal information you have
submitted to us with information from third party sources, such as public
records or entities, or private organizations. Certain activities, such as
being directed to our site from advertiser sites, entering “Greenbean.com” into
their browser, or being referred from an affiliated site, will engage some
automatic data collection.
Business Transitions
In the event our company goes through a business transition, such as a merger,
acquisition by another company, or sale of all or a portion of its assets, your
personally identifiable information will likely be among the assets
transferred. You will be notified via e-mail and/or a prominent notice on our Website
for 30 days of any such change in ownership or control of your personal
information.
Access to Personal Information / Cancellation Policy
All users may cancel their account with us at any time.
If your personal information changes, you may correct, update or delete same by
logging into your account, emailing our Customer Support, or by contacting us
by telephone or postal mail at the contact information provided on the Website.
Changes Made to this Privacy Policy
We reserve the right to change this Privacy Policy at any time. If we do, we
will post the modified version here for your review. The provisions contained
in this current Privacy Policy supersede all previous notices or policies
regarding our privacy practices with respect to this Website.
Any usage by you of any tool, service, activity, or function that we provide
post our publishing of a modified version of this Privacy Policy is your
express indication to us that you agree to be bound by each and every term and
condition of this Privacy Policy and are aware of the information contained in
the amended version of this Privacy Policy.
We encourage you to check our site frequently to view the current Privacy
Policy in order to be informed of how we are committed to protecting your
information and providing you with improved content on our Website.
Contact Us
Please contact us if you should have any questions, comments, suggestions or
concerns about this privacy policy or our Website.
Congruent Media LLC
3600 O’Donnell Street, Suite 200
Baltimore, MD 21224
(410) 534-7000
(410) 534-6901 fax
http://www.Greenbean.com/content/contact